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New director has grand designs for art gallery

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Angela Bryant has big designs for Dominican’s art scene.

As the new director of exhibitions at Dominican University’s O’Connor Art Gallery, she’s bringing to campus major artists and, she hopes, art lovers from throughout the region.

“Part of my goal is to bring everybody here. I want Chicago people coming here, I want River Forest people coming here,” Bryant says. “I think this is a great space. It’s a unique space, and I want people to see it.”

Large numbers of people did turn out for Bryant’s first curated exhibit, “Fictional Landscapes,” a dual installation by Chicago-area fiber artists Young Cho and Amy Honchell that ran September 21 through October 29. Among them were New City critic Jeremy Biles, who gave the gallery high marks, calling it “something immediately accessible to viewers…with consistently compelling results.”

The dynamic that Bryant created between the works of Honchell, an established artist and associate dean for academic affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and Cho, an emerging artist who finished an MFA at SAIC in 2009, is one that she will inform all of the exhibits she brings to the gallery.

Bryant, who holds a bachelor’s degree in art and design from Grand Valley State University and an MFA from SAIC, also runs aBryant Gallery, a virtual contemporary art gallery that holds installations in different locations to showcase emerging artists in traditional and non-traditional media.

“With these exhibits I am bringing my background with new and emerging artists. I think when you’re a new and emerging artist, you tend to take more chances, and you’re a little more fresh because of it,” Bryant says. “After you’ve shown at several galleries and people know you’re name, they get used to a certain way of you making art.”

By pairing up established and emerging artists for dual exhibits, Bryant hopes both to create thought-provoking exhibits for visitors and give current art students aspirations they can reach both soon after graduation and later in their careers.

She found an ideal location to do that in the O’Connor Art Gallery, which is located in the center of the art department, directly between art studio spaces, classrooms and faculty offices on the fourth floor of Lewis Hall.

While Bryant was pursuing her MFA at SAIC, she says, she was influenced by not only the art and artists surrounding her, but also by the layout of the school itself.

“I had to walk directly through the museum to get to my class, and just seeing priceless, epic art on the walls while I was on my way to class to study art was really inspiring for me, so I think it’s great that O’Connor is smack-dab in the middle of the art department,” Bryant says.

“I always latched onto that idea that if you’re making art and you can see people that have done it before you, that can be so powerful a motivator as something that inspires you to create.”

The gallery’s current exhibit, Cosmic Commentaries, features the work of well-known painter Michiko Itatani and up-and-coming Boston sculptor and painter Cullen Washington Jr. Each artist uses themes of outer space to tell narratives in their art. The exhibit runs through December 14.

The O'Connor Art Gallery is located on the fourth floor of Lewis Hall on Dominican’s Main Campus at 7900 West Division Street, River Forest. The gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.